5 ms·

I think it's more amazing we went from 0.02 miles one way, to 477800 round trip to the moon in just 66 years. I vaguely recall the google director saying their

• kuschku 11y ago
  > super cruise control would be insanely useful for commuters, truck drivers, and city busses. There’s something that does exactly that, is cheaper and safer: It’s called rail.
  • jfoutz 11y ago
    And people often use that, the NYC subway is a great example. But it's not so effective in lower density, or less established rail systems. You'll often see east/west travel relatively accessible, but north/south hard, for example. Rail only really serves those along the line. I'm sure phoenix could build a ring and spoke system to connect up all of those low density developments. The thing that sucks though, it's a big upfront cost. super cruise control is an incremental cost that takes advantage of existing infrastructure. Rail isn't so great at getting food to grocery stores. (cities, sure, but not actual transportation endpoints.) Such a system could be built, but trucks are so obviously effective, and they work with the existing infrastructure. Rail is cool but a big upfront cost for something that's not obviously superior to the current system seems wasteful. Maybe fill train stations with self driving taxis to cover those last few miles to home, or work, or wherever.
    • kuschku 11y ago
      Yes, the thing is just that the interstate system was in the end more expensive than similar rail infrastructure would have been (especially in maintenance). And, well, yes, cars and trucks will still be necessary, but not nearly in the same amount.
      • chadgeidel 11y ago
        I'd love to believe this quote, but light rail per mile is an order of magnitude more expensive than highway per mile. Do you have any citations I can look into? Thanks.
        • kuschku 11y ago
          The issues are essentially based on (a) how many lanes your highway has, (b) how many complex interchanges you build (interchanges with many bridges tend to lead to a cost explosion), and (c) rail tracks are usually able to be used for decades without major maintenance, while highways usually need to get filled and fixed multiple times a year. I only have a specific study for my city, where they were comparing the costs from fixing the streets in the cities from the busses running over them vs. building light rail instead, and in that study it turned out the light rail would be, if you also consider stuff like maintenance and accidents, cheaper.
        • jfoutz 11y ago
          I can't find anything more formal with a quick search, but this is pretty plausible http://alankandel.scienceblog.com/2014/01/11/rails-vs-roads-for-value-utilization-emissions-savings-difference-like-night-and-day/ http://alankandel.scienceblog.com/2014/01/11/rails-vs-roads-... $35million/mile for rail, $25million/mile for a single lane. Rail maintenance is cheaper, and ongoing costs are generally lower - you don't need police patrolling railroads. Railroads are cool, and they have a lot of advantages, but we've got this huge investment in our existing system. And unfortunately, unlike self driving cars, there isn't a smooth transition. It's like switching from pc to mac, but all of your software is home made, and must be rewritten. You have a huge upfront investment to just get started, and you have to maintain the other system as well.
          • pjc50 11y ago
            The two key advantages of road over rail: - much shorter stopping distances. This lets roads be "general access" in a way that rails have never been, even if you were to have a railway running past your house. - much smaller minimum turn radius - ability to drive around obstacles
  • jedmeyers 11y ago
    Does rail go straight to everyone's office building?
    • kuschku 11y ago
      It doesn’t have to. In a properly built city, the rail will end up less than 500m from your destination, and you can walk the rest. Example cities with okay or good rail infrastructure: New York, London, Paris, Vienna. You also save a LOT of time, because you are never stuck in traffic, and you can use the time in the train to check up on your emails, etc – and you never risk getting into an accident because you are tired after work.
      • Laaw 11y ago
        I don't live in a "properly" built city. Do you?
        • kuschku 11y ago
          I live in a european city founded around 1200 – so, while we destroyed our tram system, and our public transport is shit, I can still get everywhere with public transport equally fast as driving, often faster. I’d like to have even better infrastructure, and 24/7 service, but I don’t have an issue. I have 3 bus stations within of 300 meters, and a train station 800m from my current home.
      • Laaw 11y ago
        I don't live in a "properly" built city. Do you?
      • elithrar 11y ago
        > It doesn’t have to. In a properly built city, the rail will end up less than 500m from your destination, and you can walk the rest. Part of the problem in 2015 is that unless there was planning for rail from the start, the cost to build out rail in established areas is enormous - typically because you need to tunnel - in addition to the cost of community consultation and other access-related issues. I otherwise agree that well-planned rail into key areas would have benefited a lot of cities, especially those feeling the pain from road congestion now.
  • yellowapple 11y ago
    Safer, perhaps. Cheaper? Not so much. Rail infrastructure is expensive, both to build and to maintain. Rail is also much less tolerant to slopes and tight corners than even the most unwieldy of road vehicles (which contributes substantially to the expense; lots of terrain engineering involved in order to build a railroad that's actually safe to travel on). That said, rail does have superior cargo and passenger capacity, so these costs can be offset by the increase in potential revenue.
    • kuschku 11y ago
      Rail is, compared to the huge amount of highways and interstates built, quite cheap. Especially if one wants to expand capacity of highways to counter population increase. The sheer capacity of rail makes it even on small scale sustainable, on state scale it’s even more effective. (especially on the east coast). And with cars having such low efficiency (transporting 2 tons of metal for a single passenger using gasoline at 90km/h seems a waste when you can have a single train transporting 400 people at 320km/h using electricity instead) it’s just not really effective on large scale. New York City is a good example in the US, but cities in Europe and Japan show how even small cities and whole countries can benefit from rail infrastructure.
      • jrockway 11y ago
        By "Japan" you mean major cities in Japan. An hour or two outside Tokyo, public transportation is 1 bus every 30 minutes. A friend and I were in Yamanashi-ken last year, and we were complaining to a random shop owner about the bus schedule. She said, "twice an hour is amazing! this isn't Tokyo, you know!" Most people out there drive if they have to go somewhere.
        • kuschku 11y ago
          Twice an hour is actually not that bad – I live in a suburb of a German city with the bus to my uni only coming every 30 minutes, and it’s not a problem – almost everyone uses the bus or bike. You just have to get used to the thought that not everything happens when you need it, but instead you have to adapt to when things happen.
  • collyw 11y ago
    Most of the places I drive to don't have trains going there. Sure its great between cities, but getting into the mountains?
    • kuschku 11y ago
      The point of the parent was that for commuters, for long-distance cargo transport and for busses some "super lane guide" would be useful. Does your going into the mountains contain "driving on the same lane with thousands of others from the same place to the same place every day"? Because that’s what I was suggesting – nothing more, nothing less: Replacing mass-scale commuting with rail. Yes, if you drive somewhere where no one else wants to go, cars are still useful – but if you’re going the same path that another million people are also taking, maybe rail might be better. Rail and Road are not exclusive, they can coexist.
• mikeash 11y ago
  But how old are the guy's parents? Are they still alive?
  • jfoutz 11y ago
    Not the article with the quote, but a similar spirit. http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/187438-googles-autonomous-car-gets-a-b-in-driving-test-not-great-but-better-than-most-of-us http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/187438-googles-autonomous... Sure, they're limited, can't drive in snow. Snow shut down Atlanta because humans couldn't hack it. Autonomous cars can't compete with humans at their best, but they're consistent and know their limits. It's tough to see in tech, but some older people's driving fades fast. They arrange their lives to avoid driving on the freeway or at night.
    • astrange 11y ago
      Snow shut down Atlanta because the city did no preparation on the streets and didn't salt them, so the whole city was covered in an inch of ice. I don't think any car could drive on that as long as it used tires. There were also (according to local legend) three snowplows for the whole city in the 2000s.